by Nava Semel
“You look so much like Imri.” When she said his name, her lips looked like two arches and her cheeks glowed. If she’d met Meir, the charming butcher, first, my brother would never have had a chance.
The guys in the toolshed had talked about honey and the taste of heaven. I asked myself whether, when Zionka grew up, the taste of nectar would be in her mouth, and maybe in another place, too.
“You’re the first bride.” I stamped my foot to emphasize the warning. “There’ll be three more after you.” It didn’t scare her, and she smiled as if she found me amusing.
* * *
I was bored the whole day. I didn’t see anybody. I only heard Aunt Miriam’s voice echoing through the house. This time, she wasn’t holding any conversations with my mother in the air. She said to Anna, “Don’t worry, Imri’s looking for your relatives. He found out that they moved to Tel Aviv. He’ll find them. You won’t be alone.”
I thought Imri was avoiding me. I hadn’t been alone with him since he came back. He came in for a minute and went right out again, and then he came in again and went out again, so secretive. He whispered with the guys in the van, the ones who’d waited for him at night near the toolshed, and he didn’t call me down even once. They gave two short beeps with the horn and he disappeared immediately. I didn’t like strangers who messed up the order of things, and all of a sudden, I felt like Aunt Miriam when she gets mad at my father, who went and died without any warning. And the present I got made me mad too. Fake snow was all right for girls, maybe. If Zionka finally managed to teach me to write something, I’d give her the crystal ball as a gift, without letting Imri know.
Later, Aunt Miriam and Anna walked from the house in the direction of the synagogue and didn’t come back until late in the afternoon, and again, there was a tray at my door with a slice of bread, a tomato and a glass of milk on it. But Anna didn’t knock and didn’t ask to come in.
I hadn’t seen Mohammed all day, and Johnny Weissmuller preferred wandering around somewhere near the fence of the English air force base. I already regretted not accepting Aunt Miriam’s generous offer of an early release. But honor, as Mohammed says, is also something worth fighting for.
I sat at the window next to the string Zionka had stretched between our windows, talking into the empty tin can, but no one answered from the other end.
* * *
In the morning, I organized my school bag. I put in the books I never opened and left early. Aunt Miriam was surprised, because I’m known for always being late to school. Everyone in my class thought I’d been sick and my teacher even asked how I felt, but I didn’t believe he was really interested. You could see he was worried, because there was nothing written on the board. Zionka looked down and didn’t say a word about my punishment, not even to Herzl Fleischer, the boy that all the girls liked, who passed her notes from the end of the row every lesson.
No one showed much of an interest in me. Everyone was excited. They said the English had started looking for weapons, that they suspected we were hiding rifles in the village. In the morning, soldiers had checked all the crates of beer in Shmariyahu’s grocery, had searched the ovens in Aharonchik’s bakery and dug around in the tubs of dough, and they’d stopped Zusia the wagon driver near the pine tree and examined every sack. They even demanded to come into the synagogue, but the rabbi blocked the door with his body, shouting at the soldiers, “The wicked shall have no hope.”
At home, I found Anna in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. Her head was bent and the peels were dropping from the knife like twisted branches in the jungle. There was a piece of paper under the big pot. I could see right away that it was what Aunt Miriam called “a document.” They thought pieces of paper were extremely important. They signed them and took vows about the future, and those were the pieces of paper people read or wrote that I hated the most.
Aunt Miriam and Anna stopped talking when I came into the room.
Aunt Miriam informed me that, “Starting tomorrow, Anna will help you with the beehives.”
I understood from that that Anna was staying, and Aunt Miriam, as if she could read my mind, added, “For the time being.”
In the evening, Anna and Imri sat on the porch. I was running after Johnny Weissmuller, teaching him how to run in circles. He’d started sucking up to me the minute my punishment was over. At first, I was tough with him, but it was hard to be too mad at a dog. I asked Johnny Weissmuller to show me how he managed to slip into the English base, and he wagged his tail, signaling that he was ready to take me there immediately, but it was already dark.
I didn’t care if I was bothering Anna and Imri. I still hoped he’d pay some attention to me, that he’d say something to me, even ask how my reading was coming along, but they were caught up in each other, and I was as invisible as the air for them.
“The sky looks closer here,” Anna remarked. I looked up to check, and it looked perfectly normal to me. Maybe only pilots see it differently. I didn’t understand how a person could one day just leave the place he was born, the place he’s so used to, whose language he speaks, and move far away to a place where, even if they beg him to come and promise him he’ll be one of them, they keep on treating him like a foreigner. If they ordered me to live in the world that’s inside the crystal ball, I would run away to Africa. If Imri hadn’t been so busy working for the homeland, maybe he’d find out what I like more and what I like less. Sometimes, I thought he didn’t know me at all, and I really didn’t know him either.
Imri smoked cigarettes. Players. I’d already snatched a few from him and smoked them secretly in the toolshed and out where the beehives were. Only Johnny Weissmuller knew, but dogs never snitch. Sometimes, Imri smoked a pipe, but I didn’t dare steal it, because he would know.
The burning red tip of his cigarette moved towards Anna. Through the curls of smoke, Imri said he didn’t want to go, but he had to. He had no choice, because he had to do what he had to do. The day would come —
Johnny Weissmuller barked.
“Shut up,” I scolded him, “and let me listen.” I could hear better through the empty tin cans tied to the string.
I didn’t know which one of them was taller. I think Anna was. Imri whispered, “These are just words on papers. They don’t mean anything.” Anna turned her head, looked again at the sky she thought was so close.
Imri touched her and asked her to wait.
Anna said, “It took us a week to get married in Poland. In Eretz Israel, it took me a minute to give you a divorce.” Their heads were very close together. You couldn’t see any separation between them. I couldn’t tell whether, at that moment, he was tasting her nectar.
I whispered to Johnny Weissmuller that they were divorced. It was all over. Soon, she’d leave. The piece of paper on the table—not an especially big piece, just a few lines—was proof that now Anna was nothing to me. Not even fictitiously.
Chapter 8
Imri went to Europe for the second time and Anna gradually became part of the village. In the beginning, people would stop her on the street, or in Shmariyahu’s grocery, and ask her where she was from, Warsaw or Galicia, Chelm or Lublin, Pinsk or Minsk, so the strange names of those places got stuck in my ears.
The ones who remembered Polish spoke Polish to her, and the ones whose father or grandmother was born there, before our village was founded, asked her if, by chance, she knew this man or that family, and they were very disappointed when she didn’t.
They tried all kinds of accents on her, to see exactly what region she came from, and Mali Perlmutter whispered that she looked like a shiksa—a nasty name for a woman who isn’t Jewish—and suggested the possibility that Anna was a spy the English had planted in the village to find out whether we were hiding weapons.
Zionka’s mother also had relatives in Poland, who invited her to come with Zionka for the summer. In her high, squeaky voice, she questioned Anna about whether she should go. “How could it be that you never heard of the Rosenbergs? They have
a lace and velvet factory and two stores on the main street of Warsaw.” She bragged that her uncle ran a business patronized by aristocrats, and all the Polish ladies stood in line in his store to buy silk for their ball gowns. Then, Zionka’s mother told everyone that Anna came from a shtetl, a remote little town on the Russian border that wasn’t even on the map. In order to get out of that far-off place, where she didn’t have a chance to get ahead, she latched onto the first man she could, our Imri. Some bargain.
And Zionka’s mother said to the rabbi, “They should bring the Jews from Warsaw. They’re a different class of people.” And he said, “They are all our people. Many will come yet from the four corners of the earth. The ten lost tribes, even from Africa.”
The rabbi drank tea at our house on his regular day. Sometimes, Aunt Miriam served herring, which I really hate. This time, Zionka’s mother joined them. Like always, she said how beautiful the china was, and didn’t forget to remind the people present that Aunt Miriam had inherited it from my mother. What interested her most was what Anna had brought with her from Poland. She’d sniffed out what was in the “dowry trunk,” and she winked at my aunt when she called it that.
I said to the rabbi, “How will you know whether the people who come from Africa are Jews? Will you ask whether they’re called ‘dirty Jews’ in Swahili?
Aunt Miriam wrung her hands. “What will I do with that boy? Only trouble he brings. All day long, he listens to the grown-ups’ conversations. Don’t you have anything to do, you little smart-aleck? Why don’t you open a book? You don’t try hard enough. You have to try.”
Zionka’s mother added, “What’s that string between our windows? Did you and Zionka decide to hang some Englishman on it?”
“It’s our magical device, like the kind all our great leaders have, “ I said. “A famous invention. You can talk to someone who’s far away, someone you can’t see.”
The rabbi said, “We’ll soon be sending messages to the Almighty Himself, may His name be blessed.”
Aunt Miriam added another spoonful of sugar to her tea, stirring it over and over again. “He doesn’t hear. You’re better off talking to the air,” she whispered, and I moved away from them.
Don’t they have any nasty names for that Almighty they talk about as if He were a man? If we were created in His image, then it can’t be that no one insults or curses him. I can’t make up my mind whether to ask the rabbi. And another thought worries me. I really hope God can’t read or write.
The three people in the room gulped down their tea in one swallow and complimented Aunt Miriam on her apple cake, the one they asked her to bake especially for all the weddings and bar mitzvahs in the village. The rabbi lowered his voice. “The English suspect,” he said. “We have to be very careful. I told Imri he shouldn’t rush to get married again, because the villains are checking every passport entry, and as far as weapons are concerned ... “ and the rabbi stopped talking when he saw that I was devouring every word.
Anna was working in the hen house then. Aunt Miriam had taught her everything she needed to know about chickens. She got up early, gathered the eggs and waited for Zusia the wagon driver, who picks up the eggs from all the hen houses and brings them to Tnuva, the cooperative dairy. She also fed the chickens sorghum grains and made sure the chicks didn’t escape from the coop. I said soft words to the chickens, the ones I learned from Mohammed to whisper in the horse’s ear. I was sure Aunt Miriam hadn’t taught Anna any soft words, because she said that talking to animals is a waste of time. You’d think talking to dead people made more sense.
Working with the beehives was more complicated. I felt experienced and important explaining to Anna everything Mohammed had taught me.
We were sitting in the toolshed, and I was taking apart the equipment and describing how the hive was built, where the queen bee’s cell was, how the workers feed the female bee with special food that will turn her into a queen. And I also told Anna about the bees’ special language, which is a language of dance. Sometimes they dance the “circle dance” and sometimes the “moving tail dance,” and through their dancing, they tell the pollen gatherers where they should fly and where they can find the richest pollen. And while I was telling her, I kept looking at her lips.
At first, she remained standing. Maybe she thought it would be a short lesson. But when she became convinced that the words weren’t coming to an end so fast, she knelt next to me, looking in amazement at the way I had folded my legs under me.
I said, “Try it, it’s very comfortable,” and continued explaining the signs, also using my hands, a language anybody could understand. When the honey is gathered, in the spring and summer, the bees are active, but in the autumn and winter, the hives are still. The bees huddle around the queen to protect her until the cold passes. And I told her that every hive has only one queen, and if, God forbid, another one suddenly appeared, the two would go to war. A queen would never draw her weapon, a crooked sword, from its sheath to use on a person, an animal or an ordinary bee, but only to fight an equal to the bitter end.
“The bitter end?” Anna sounded worried. She tried to fold her legs under her, like mine, but she couldn’t manage it, because her long dress was in the way. She listened to me, like the best pupil in the class. She reminded me of Zionka. I showed her the tools we use for gathering the honey, the jars and the slabs of beeswax and the forks, and said, “Until one of them dies.”
The toolshed was neatly organized. I suddenly had the feeling that it was too neat. I didn’t remember that Mohammed or I had cleaned everything and put it all in its place like the English soldiers on the parade grounds. Even my grandfather’s old clay pots, the ones he raised bees in in the old days, were leaning against the wall, and someone had wiped off the wax and the dust. I thought that maybe Imri had a guilty conscience for leaving me before the harvest season, and to make up for it, he’d prepared a surprise for us. All of a sudden, I noticed that something was missing. The old hives with the empty honeycombs we used only in the busy season, had disappeared. I didn’t even have to move things around and look for them, because everything was standing there, except for the gray boxes.
Maybe Mohammed had taken them to his village to fix or paint them, even though I didn’t recall anything breaking.
Anna was running her fingers over the cells of the hive. For a minute, I suspected that she was the one who’d stolen the hives to get back at me for the candlestick I’d snatched.
“What do you do if the bees try to sting you?”
I said, “You stand still as a statue. Bees only sting when they feel something is threatening their lives, a hawk, for example. You don’t move, and you breathe as quietly as you can. Till the danger passes.”
“But you don’t always know when the danger has passed.” Anna pushed her hands into the protective gloves. “The bees see us differently than we really are, don’t you think?”
I know everything about bees, Anna, even though they’re always in motion, I can see them, I understand.
“They see different colors, nothing like the range of colors we see,” I declared confidently. Maybe what we are isn’t really what we are, and only the bees are smart enough to know that. They can’t tell the difference between somebody from our village and somebody from an Arab village, or somebody from a shtetl in Poland, or from England.
Anna was putting on her beekeeper’s mask. Her lips, with or without nectar, disappeared like the old hives. I heard her whisper, “I’m scared.”
I realized then that Anna had not plotted to steal any hives. She didn’t even know they existed. I stood up. For a minute, I was taller than she was. She was sitting at my feet, her legs folded perfectly under her.
Chapter 9
We worked quietly. Anna watched what I did and imitated me exactly. She learned fast and worked quickly. She sometimes looked curiously at the English base on the other side of the fence. One of the Hawkers took off and moved rapidly out over the sea. I asked myself whether I w
ould ever get to fly
Using long forks, we took off the coating of wax and put the slabs of honey inside the centrifuge. I turned the handle, and the honey poured out into the containers. Our bees are very good producers, Anna, and their honey is famous in the whole country. People order their autumn Rosh HaShana supply at Passover, in the spring. I don’t have to read the labels I paste onto the jars. I’ve heard Imri repeat a thousand times that they say, “The First Hebrew Honey after Two Thousand Years. Made in Eretz Israel.” I even remember my father reading the first label that came from the printers. It was a few days before his heart stopped beating.
Anna held the pouring device firmly. She had long, strong fingers, and she didn’t let a drop of honey get away. Even though she was covered from head to toe, I could feel the fear oozing out of her. I worked without a mask, so she would know I wasn’t afraid of any bee. Deep down inside me, I was positive they recognized the troublemaker and wouldn’t do him any harm.
“Is ‘Zydowica’ worse than ‘troublemaker’?” We were standing next to the English fence.
Anna didn’t have a chance to reply.
“Here’s our little Zionist spy,” a voice came from the other side of the fence. “Where’s Johnny Weissmuller?”
The English pilot, Major Charles Timothy Parker, was bent over, picking though the dirt, looking for something under the fence posts, and the horse standing next to him was trying to sniff the grass on our side. The Englishman straightened up. His brass buttons gleamed in the light of the setting sun.
“Is your Arab with you, too?” he asked, looking at the completely covered figure beside me. You couldn’t tell it was a woman.
“Mohammed is not ‘my Arab’. He’s my friend!”
The sound of the airplanes had already been swallowed up by the soft darkness. The gliding Hawker left no traces in the sky.
